SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
Are there ethical 'frontiers' that games should not cross? A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Secret Hitler and whether games could promote Fascism. Then came news that Russian toy company Igroland had published a boardgame about the 2018 Novichok poisonings: Our Guys in Salisbury has players retracing the route of GRU goons Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin on their way from Moscow to Salisbury to attack former-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia (and, let it be noted, poison DS Nick Bailey and bystander Charlie Rowley and kill Charlie's partner Dawn Sturgess). Our Guys in Salisbury is a real game, with a print run of 5000 copies in Russia, but it's also a stunt. The mechanics seem to be risible: roll dice, race to the end, obey instructions to go back or forward, Snakes & Ladders basically. Since a product like this has no market among proper gamers and is lost on children, its raison-d'etre is to make a political point. Game designer Mikhail Bober puts it like this: This was an idea of our answer to western media: enough already. To us, it’s not funny any more. It’s sad. This needs to stop. Bober is referring the UK's insistence that Chepiga and Mishkin poisoned the Skripals on the orders of the Russian state. Although dogs in the street know this to be true, Russian media flunkeys at RT follow the Kremlin line that it's all a big joke, sending out chocolate Salisbury cathedrals as a Christmas message of goodwill. Bober sees his game as a similar contribution to international banter: If anyone died in Salisbury, then we didn’t want to offend anyone. The idea of the game is a kind of joke, and a bridge of friendship. Note the 'if' at the start of that comment? In Russia, where only 3% of people think the Russian state was behind the poisonings (source: Levada Centre, October 2018), the question of whether Dawn Sturgess is even dead seems to be something on which gentlemen might reasonably disagree. Our Guys in Salisbury can be dismissed as a sort of commercial trolling inspired by Putin's campaign of fake news and disinformation. But Bober has limits. No board games about his country's annexation of Crimea will be forthcoming. Definitely not about Ukraine, a fair number of people have died there, there are a lot of opinions and everyone has their own truth. There are victims there, it would be stupid to use it in a commercial project. So, no victims in Salisbury, then, eh Mikhail? But Bober's stray remark that 'everyone has their own truth' is a moral insight that's worth sticking with. Let's take a look at Escape from Colditz, published by Gibsons in 1973 but re-released in 2016 by Osprey. The game was designed by Major Pat Reid, MBE, MC. Reid himself escaped from Colditz in 1942. The new edition of Escape from Colditz (with Eagle, not Swastika) - and Major Pat Reid Escape from Colditz is a striking expression of the idea that everyone has their own truth, because, as well as up to 5 teams of escaping POWs, one player plays the German guards. This needs repeating. In a game published barely 30 years after the War, one players gets to be the Germans and, if the Security Officer manages to contain all the POWs for long enough, the Germans win. And handshakes all round! Pat Reid's game embodies the challenging notion that German Wehrmacht officers have their own truth: if they are intelligent and efficient and perhaps gamble shrewdly, they will win the game. I'm sure that this concept is rooted in Reid's own POW experience, which informed his understanding that his guards were doing their job, some of them with commendable diligence, and that, from their perspective, the hell-bent escapers were not heroic freedom-lovers, but the baddies! Ha ha. Of course, the guards at POW camps - even Colditz - were not SS. I don't know if Reid intended his game to serve as a moral fable about war, but it expresses values that aren't easy to digest. Mikhail Bober is shy about a game based on annexing Russian Crimea, because everyone has their own truth, even Ukrainian nationalists who see their country being dismembered by Vladimir Putin's cynical project. But a game expressing this insight as fair-mindedly as Escape from Colditz does would, I suspect, meet with not-so-gentle reproof from the Kremlin, so don't expect Igroland to publish it any time soon. Bober's Salisbury game doesn't allow conflicting truths to be expressed. You make a one-way journey through Europe to Salisbury. If you believe that Chepiga and Mishkin's mission was murder, not sightseeing, you cannot subvert it by playing to lose. The structure of the game compels you on down a linear path that ends under a picture of the Cathedral tower (123 metres tall!) and images of figures in hazmat suits. The deed is done and the poison is delivered. By playing the game, you cannot challenge the outcome and this is what makes it propaganda rather than a true game. Escape from Colditz makes a striking moral decision in its game design. Black Orchestra takes a different approach. In this game, the players are German patriots plotting to assassinate Hitler. These real-world conspirators include truly idealistic characters, like Dietrich Bonhoffer, military pragmatists, like General Beck (who simply thought the War was being badly-led), along with odious types like Admiral Canaris (innovator of the Star of David for identifying Jews), Von Tresckow (enslaver of Polish and Ukrainian children as forced labour), Von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise, but an anti-Semite) and Erich Kordt (Soviet agent). Very much a case of everyone has their own truth mixed with a dash of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The game has many similarities to Colditz, such as gathering cards representing papers, tools, disguises and weapons that can be combined to fulfil the requirements of a successful plot. But it also has a striking difference: no one gets to play Hitler or his Gestapo. Black Orchestra involves cooperative game play against a card-driven A.I.. Hitler is the game itself, trying to beat you. As the War progresses, Hitler's power intensifies and the Gestapo become more suspicious: the stakes rise. This is a brilliant idea, exploring everyone having their own truth while sparing a player the burden of winning as Hitler. And it would be a burden. The defeat of Hitler is the foundational moral event in modern, post-religious ethics. 'Killing Hitler' lies at the heart of our political values: we make his sort of regime impossible through checks and balances, democratic accountability, embedded rights and a shared culture of repudiation. When it seems that Hitler might not be dead and that he (or rather, someone else enacting his agenda) might return to power, we become alarmed. And rightly. Black Orchestra creates a 'ludic reality' in which you might succeed in killing Hitler or might fail (in which case, the tragedy of history plays itself out in its familiar pattern) but no one is asked to work towards Hitler's mission. The game does that dirty job for you. I'd have a bit more respect for Bober's dismal Salisbury game if it were merely trying to inoculate its players against morally unacceptable situations the way Black Orchestra does. There are no games about escaping from Auschwitz for this very reason. The historical fact of the death camps - and the related paradox that the people who staffed them were not in fact monsters - is one of those phenomenon that defy our moral understanding and you cannot make a game out of something you don't understand. Instead, Our Guys In Salisbury celebrates the poisoning of 5 people in Wiltshire last year, but treats it simply as a baffling event to which players are uninvolved spectators. It's like creating a Snakes & Ladders game about the Kennedy Assassination ('grassy knoll, go back 2 spaces') or 911 ('Flight 175 hits the South Tower, miss a turn') with no sense that these events are tragic or criminal. Now you might say, what's the difference between a Novichok-themed game and any game that takes as its subject matter some historical disaster or sacrifice? Igroland's development director 'Alexander' defends the Salisbury game like this: Thousands die every day ... Better to ask an arms maker how Kalashnikov is doing, how American or Israeli defence firms are doing, you'd do better to find that out. It's just funny Right enough, lots of games are themed around events where people died. Nearly half a million people died during the Battle of Normandy: does that make games like Memoir '44 in bad taste? Isn't playing a victorious German defence at Omaha Beach as morally toxic as helping Hitler survive a patriotic conspiracy? For that matter, what about other play-the-Germans games from the '70s and '80s like Third Reich or Axis & Allies? Ah, those big old hex map-boards and fiddly cardboard chits bring a nostalgic shudder. Memoir '44's Omaha Beach set-up (image 2) has a clean and tidy, up-to-date aesthetic I think the degree of personalisation and stylisation matters. Colditz has you playing impersonal pawns rather than named prisoners. Memoir '44 is highly stylised, rather than being a soldier-by-soldier recreation of battle casualties. The other games take a God's-eye view of the conflict, focusing on surges and pincers and chokepoints rather than the fates of this unit or that officer. But just as important is the sense of moral closure. WW2 is over: its combatants now meet and shake hands at Armistice celebrations, its nations are now allies. The conflict is resolved, the reparations made: we have moved on. But this is exactly what hasn't happened with the Novichok poisonings. Russia hasn't even admitted culpability, never mind apologised or made reparations to the Skripals or the family of Dawn Sturgess. In this context, the game muddies rather than clarifies - and is intended to do so. It's fake news by other means. Slightly more controversially, I feel that the mere passage of time doesn't close cases. Look at games based around the 1888-1891 Whitechapel Murders. I'm uncomfortable with any game which has someone playing the role of Jack the Ripper. Perhaps as a concession to such feelings, FFG's Letters from Whitechapel uses historically accurate detectives but replaces the Ripper's historical victims with generic tokens representing 'the Wretched' of Victorian London. Other games, like Bruno Cathala's Mister Jack, recreate the cat-and-mouse aspect of the chase, but not the actual murders. Letters from Whitechapel is immersive but macabre with anonymous victims drawn from 'The Wretched' of Victorian London; Mister Jack is more abstract and the victims don't feature at all Good, because the Whitechapel Murders are unresolved, even if no one alive today is directly affected by the representation of them in games. Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Mary Kelly and the others were real women, horribly murdered and mutilated, and the passage of a century shouldn't diminish their status as human victims in an unsolved crime, any more than the passing of a decade makes a Madeleine McCann game less obnoxious. Then FFG go and complicate things by releasing the Dear Boss expansion to Letters from Whitechapel, which now identifies the historical suspects and victims in cards. My heart sinks - but it is well handled. The gameplay is stylised so that the Victim Card acts as a sort of meta rules tweak rather than recreating the circumstances of a particular woman's ugly death. The historical details on the card are sympathetic. The level of immersion is not gratuitous. There are no images of corpses. It's far above Our Guys in Salisbury in terms of its moral engagement with its subject matter, but it still skirts pretty close to the frontier. Of course, there are books and films by the truckload based around D-Day (Saving Private Ryan) or the Whitechapel Murders (From Hell). True, but narrative art guides our responses: it leads us by the hand, showing us some things but not others, in order to make an imaginative point. If it's handled badly, it's on the author or film-maker. Games work differently: they give agency to the players so that we ourselves are doing these things, not just watching them or reading about them. What view to take then of video games, like KumaWar: Osama 2011 which enables you to play the US Navy SEALS who killed Osama Bin Laden? Re-enacting, for entertainment purposes, the state-sponsored assassination of a real person (even that person) leaves me ill-at-ease. Previous episodes of KumaWar courted controversy by simulating the Battle of Fallujah, in which 71 US troops died (and 1600 insurgents). There was understandable outrage from the families of the soldiers. What the families of the insurgents felt goes unreported. You might argue that Osama Bin Laden is just 'Hitler' for the 21st century: killing Bin Laden is a metaphor for what we're all about as a liberal, democratic, secular civilisation. Perhaps, but the sense of moral closure is missing. In fact, the conflict triggered by Bin Laden is still raging. Playthrough of KumaWar featuring Osama but no defenders. No women or children either. Was that moral delicacy on the designer's part? Another feature KumaWar is that, although Osama is an A.I. moving target, another player can control Taliban-guards defending the compound. So there's an acknowledgement too that everyone has their own truth - although the tactical situation is weighted heavily in favour of the SEALs, who get rewarded when victorious with a cut-scene of Bin Laden's burial at sea. This is 'spiking the ball' for the victorious Americans, which is something Escape from Colditz does not do for victorious escaping players at the expense of the German player. Bin Laden, the compound, the final showdown and the 'ball spiking' funeral after a US victory Kuma Games CEO Keith Halper defends the Bin Laden episode of the franchise like this: At Kuma, we are very sensitive and respectful of American and coalition soldiers and the sacrifices they are making every day. We hope that by telling their stories with such a powerful medium that we enable the American public to gain a better appreciation of the conflicts and the dangers they face. I can't make my mind up on what Kuma is doing here. Honouring the courage and skill of US soldiers doing a dangerous but necessary job? Or ghoulish exploitation of a messy extra-judicial killing for entertainment and propaganda? It's right on the frontier, isn't it? But it's still better than Mikhail Bober's inane defence of his Salisbury game as "a kind of joke, and a bridge of friendship".
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